Balanced Braces

     A long time ago there was a young upstart programmer who believed firmly in coding standards and the DRY principle. He was in a dev team which, for the most part was fairly productive, despite their manager. One day the dev team met with their seasoned manager who was deeply imbued with the lead-last form of leadership and well versed in the art of stifling progress, as a good seasoned manager should be.

     One day the upstart programmer disagreed with the seasoned manager on the topic of database normalization. The upstart programmer, seeing that the database was unnecessarily repeating too much of the same data, in various tables, wanted to apply DRY principles by adopting at least the first normal form, otherwise known as 1NF.

     Upon hearing the upstart’s argument, the seasoned manager responded with,

“Young upstart, you may read a lot of books, but out in the real world, out on the street, we do things differently.”

     Thus began the legend of the Street Programmer.

     You see, the seasoned manager had real world experience, and in his world, real-world programmers (the type that programmed from the street) simply didn’t have time to read books, or catch up on latest technologies. No, in fact, if they didn’t agree with the purpose of a new concept, they burrowed themselves deeper into their comfortable leather chairs and dismissed all comers for lack of experience.

     The seasoned manager, being a Street Programmer himself, went on to talk down the use of hashed and encoded passwords, the uselessness of Object Oriented Programming, and spoke lovingly of the use of REGISTER GLOBALS in PHP. This was not a man to be trifled with, he was a man of the street, and he knew his business.

     The upstart programmer, having seen the error of his ways, turned his face downward and exited the conference room where the Street Programmer reigned supreme, and subsequently got a new job that though lacking in a sufficient amount of Street Programmers, was still able to make do. The Street Programmer’s company had other ideas, he was able to sell it to marketing types who bought into the depth of his Street Programming knowledge, and he walked away a happy man.